awn!

Madame Thenardier was vicious with Cosette. Eponine and Azelma were
vicious. Children at that age are only copies of their mother. The size
is smaller; that is all.

A year passed; then another.

People in the village said:--

"Those Thenardiers are good people. They are not rich, and yet they are
bringing up a poor child who was abandoned on their hands!"

They thought that Cosette's mother had forgotten her.

In the meanwhile, Thenardier, having learned, it is impossible to say by
what obscure means, that the child was probably a bastard, and that the
mother could not acknowledge it, exacted fifteen francs a month, saying
that "the creature" was growing and "eating," and threatening to send
her away. "Let her not bother me," he exclaimed, "or I'll fire her brat
right into the middle of her secrets. I must have an increase." The
mother paid the fifteen francs.

From year to year the child grew, and so did her wretchedness.

As long as Cosette was little, she was the scape-goat of the two other
children; as soon as she began to develop a little, that is to say,
before she was even five years old, she became the servant of the
household.

Five years old! the reader will say; that is not probable. Alas! it is
true. Social suffering begins at all ages. Have we not recently seen the
trial of a man named Dumollard, an orphan turned bandit, who, from the
age of five, as the official documents state, being alone in the world,
"worked for his living and stole"?

Cosette was made to run on errands, to sweep the rooms, the courtyard,
the street, to wash the dishes, to even carry burdens. The Thenardiers
considered themselves all the more authorized to behave in this manner,
since the mother, who was still at M. sur M., had become irregular in
her payments. Some months she was in arrears.

If this mother had returned to Montfermeil at the end of these three
years, she would not have recognized her child. Cosette, so pretty and
rosy on her arrival in that house, was now thin and pale. She had an
indescribably uneasy look. "The sly creature," said the Thenardiers.

Injustice had made her peevish, and misery had made her ugly. Nothing
remained to her except her beautiful eyes, which inspired pain, because,
large as they were, it seemed as though one beheld in them a still
larger amount of sadness.

It was a heart-breaking thing to see this poor child, not yet six years
old, shivering in the winter in her old rag